October 1, 2005

Today’s another exciting day as we move closer to Beta 1. We are just wrapping up the MVP summit here in Redmond and we’ve finally announced another piece of functionality I’ve wanted to talk about for a long time now. This afternoon Steven Sinofsky announced to our MVPs that we will build in native support for the PDF format in Office “12″. I constantly get asked by customers if we can build in this support for publishing documents as PDF files, and now I can thankfully say “yes!” It’s something we’ve been hearing about for years, and earlier in this project we decided that while there were already existing third party tools for doing this, we should do the work to build the functionality natively into the product.

The PDF support will be built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, OneNote, Visio, and InfoPath!

More by following the link, but one interesting factoid is that Microsoft is seeing “over 30,000 searches per week for PDF support” at the Office Online web site.

UPDATE (Oct. 2): There is now a Microsoft press release featuring Q&A with Steven Sinofsky (senior vice president of the Microsoft Office product development group).